I am not as progressed into the hardmodes as I would like to be, due to various outside wow issues. So still a fair few to go for me as tank. It does however mean I am a little better geared than I would normally be for progression.

I have been toying with dropping my stam gems and going more into experise/haste. Alternatively just switching my straight stam gems to hybrid gems. When I killed heroic stone guards early on I had to go stam to stay alive but that was a fair few upgrades ago.

Tank damage in 10man is relatively high on some heroics but I am wondering if more mitigation / dps would be more efficient.

It's hard to compare stam against mitigation, but was wondering what other 10man tanks are doing? What about trinkets, stam or mitigation?

In previous tiers I have also healed the heroic content on an alt, which helps a lot in understanding healer pressure and so tank gearing. Not been able to do that this time around yet.

We're a casual guild, and I haven't gotten to the HC parts yet, but so far I've been just fine without stamina gems/trinkets/glove+boot enchants. Right now I'm sitting at 583k HP raid buffed. However, I'm pretty sure I'll be using the stamina trinkets and enchants, and perhaps swap some haste gems for stamina as well, once we're starting HCs. I'll just have to see first how painful it'll be.

If you plan on gemming for stamina, be sure to equip 2 pure stamina gems, and enchant your cloak, gloves and boots with stamina as well. These options offer more stamina than the gems, but are often overlooked.

For the best places to get your stamina, check: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=33197 Simply work your way down from the top to the bottom of the list, until you're happy with your current amount of stamina.

Tank deaths are a part of the game, it's when they become the reason a wipe is happening that it's a problem.

As I said, we're yet to wipe to my death because ~I~ messed up. If we're wiping cause I died and I did not use a CD because a healer and/or DPS messed up a soak or didn't kill an add, then yes, I will admit that ~I~ caused that wipe. And if it continues to be a problem, then obviously I have to do something else.

Now, one thing I do do, is I keep my trinkets locked a specific way so I can swap them out for heavy magic fights. IE: Lei Shi and Elegon. I gear and gem around having either two stam trinkets or haste ones.

I've been running full haste gems, 1 haste + 1 stam trinket and haste elixirs for all but our 1st kings hm kill where I went stam to give myself and the healers more breathing room (wasn't really needed but neither was my dps).We've had a few exploratory pulls on Lei Shi hm, that's going to be a max stam fight, everything else except maybe Empress hm looks to benefit more from haste on 10 man than stam to me, (not certain about Tsulong and Sha as I haven't pulled them on hm yet.)Having said that I think for early pulls on new bosses it's often very beneficial to start out with extra stam, then switch to more haste when you start hitting berserk and/or you and the healers have got your cd timings sorted.

I have never really seen much point in Colossus. I read theck's post, well skimmed it, and can see that it offers the best dmg reduction, but its a tiny shield and all in all have preferred a dps enchant. Had completely forgotten about the wep chain (now feeling a little stupid, I am a blacksmith for crying out loud, its even there on Thecks post, my excuse is I read away from my raiding computer so had time to forget), that might even be a more interesting option. All of the options provide some degree of dmg reduction.

Saying that, thinking about it 7.5k shield is probably about equal to 1 stam gems, allowing for uptime.

I think considering i am still below the expertise cap a little, I should switch to wep chain.

Planning to switch your gemming setup mid progression is bad for the healers. They need to get a feel of how the damage is incoming so they get into the rythm of the fight and mana management they need. If you start the fight, planning to switch, it means they know that their learning is wrong. Swiching because another setup is discovered to be better is a different story. Healing tends to be a fine balancing act of tank vs raid vs mana.

EDIT: upto starting on Stone Guards Heroic, i was running mitigation build and quickly changed to stam when I got pounded to the floor a few times. It was clear at mostly blues level of gear, that more stam was needed, now I am not so sure. I guess that equation may change again when the new tier hits.

The Chain was especially useful at the start when it was hard to hit/exp cap, and when I was still farming HCs for gear, with mobs left and right that disarmed a lot.

I finally upgraded from my Hozen's Slicer to the LFR Sha Touched, and immediately upped it twice with Valor and put Dancing Steel on it. Considering most of our wipes are due to hitting Berserk timers, not to me dying, DPS seems more important than survivability at the moment.

Haven't had a chance to test this out in raids due to the breaks, but doing over 60k consistently in 5 mans was a tad of a surprise. I wonder how long it'll be before we can just solo heroics.

I was solo tanking windlord (always get the two mixed up, the one with lots of adds) and stam stacking I was dying a little more often that i would liked. Switched to 2 mitigation trinkets and switched out a few straight stam gems and the difference was stunning, not had a tank death since.

Gemming full haste/hit/exp is the way I go. I like having some extra stam for heroic Lei Shi and heroic Sha, so I trade in a stam trink for both. Other than that I dont touch stam, I think I have one or two stam enchants but that's it.